LOVE, VOLTAIRE, AND ENLIGHTENMENT – AMIT MUKHOPADHYAY

What is Love?

 From Plato to the contemporary French Philosopher Alain Badiou, every writer, philosopher, politician, civil rights activist, and scientist has tried to define love. Phaedrus, the ancient philosopher claimed that love is God. Hesiod thought love was born to chaos and earth. Did Charles Darwin come close to that view? Charles Darwin in his book, ‘On the Origin of Species’ (1859) explored the idea of evolution of all living beings through the process of ‘Natural Selection’. In general terms, all living beings are born and evolve through chaos and struggle and they survive through the process of natural selection. But Darwin is primarily talking about biological evolution. Does the process of ‘Natural Selection’ have anything to do with Love or our choices of why we fall in love and desire a particular person?

“Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by Imagination?”

                                                                Voltaire

How can we understand this statement by Voltaire? A canvas begins blank, and so does love, until nature’s gifts like beauty, charm, personality, temperament, and character enter the imagination of the lover (imagination also begins as blank) and draws him into the canvas to paint the image of LOVE. We might infer here, that love has the natural power of attraction which has a magnetic bond purely ruled by the heart. Love and emotional bonds are fundamental aspects of human existence that have been in existence throughout man’s evolutionary history. From Neolithic to Chalcolithic, to the ancient societies of Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, and India, love has been experienced in a variety of ways. Along with this, the fundamental values of love have also changed.1

A Brief Note on the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

 A study of ancient  DNA  has unearthed how the human body and mind have changed over time. The social life of the Stone Age (Europe) reveals the fact that young women in the fifth millennia BC left their small community to enter into new ones with a male partner for love and eventually into a sexual relationship. Here we are talking about a nomadic life system that depended on hunting and food gathering. In this uncoded life system, women probably had more freedom to choose their life partners, a more natural phenomenon that is unthinkable today. Our life systems changed radically once agriculture began in different parts of the globe some 12,000 years ago. From food gathering to the agricultural system, man learned to settle down with certain laws and values of love, family life, and ownership of land, and cattle. Women naturally became the property of men, and for many centuries Love had no VALUES attached to it. All this changed again with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution during the period from 1760-1848 in Britain. In another major change, human society moved from the agrarian economy to industry and machine manufacturing. Fundamentally our civilization changed from a Feudal system to an early capitalist society, giving rise to the Bourgeois society which radicalised all the value systems including our ideas of Love and women, our family life, the ownership of property etc. But France was still reeling under the Monarchy and Voltaire was born in 1694. Caught in the conflicting paradigm shift between the old and emerging new in Britain, the effects of the bourgeois values must have reached in France, which helped Voltaire to look at the existing Institutions like the Church, Religion, Customs, Monarchy, Law, Justice and above all his views about Love and relationships with women.

Love in the Chateau of Cirey

We talked about Love.

You and me.

We saw soldiers marching, Napoleon waving his shining sword.

Riding his beautiful white horse, we saw Goethe kissing the flower girl.

We watched the emperor, the priest with a walking stick in his left hand and the Bible in his right hand.

We heard Mozart’s lifelong love for soprano voice for the last time.

We talked about Newton and Descartes.

We talked about Love.

You and me.